Residents also believe that with structured parking there will be more traffic congestion. Actually, it has been shown that there is less congestion because people immediately go to the deck to park, rather than cruise through town looking for spaces.

While this makes intuitive sense, it only works if the parking is priced correctly. There are numerous examples of nearly empty parking garages adjacent to fully occupied, and highly congested, city streets - this occurs if the garage is priced higher than the street parking. To get drivers to move promptly into garages, rather than cruising to find a street space, the garage must be less expensive than the street, potentially by a large margin.

An exhibit about the liminal, substanceless, and static space of automotive transience.

Around the nation, inexpensive curbside parking results in increased traffic, wasted fuel, and more pollution. It’s time to rethink the way streets are used!

Making a parking space into a park is one way of rethinking. Another is charging the fair market price for parking spaces. Many (most?) cities charge too little for their parking - citizens should be outraged at this wasteful subsidy to automobile drivers. Thus, I join the call to rise up and protest wasteful parking management practices!

“New wireless technologies will link not just people but lots of objects too. That will be tremendously useful… but getting there will be tricky”

It looks like the introductory article is available at the link above, but for the whole thing you’ll need to be a subscriber, or you can purchase the magazine on the newsstand.

I don’t mean to rain on the parade, but I’m less impressed with some other aspects of this project. For starters, the garage has “sweeping city and ocean views” - why in the world was it not built with residential and/or office space around the outside of the structure?! A garage with great views is a wasted opportunity. Santa Monica residents should hold their politicians accountable for wasting these valuable views on such a low-value use as parking.

The cost of the project also seems way too high - even after subtracting the $1.5mil solar system from the $29mil project cost, you are still left with a per parking space cost of over $31,000! Some underground garages, which typically incur the highest construction costs, are built for a per-space price less than that - and they leave the valuable airspace above for higher value development. It is unfortunate that this, the first LEED certified garage, will suggest to the parking industry that environmentally-friendly garages cost much more - I’m guessing that this project will actually do more harm than good when it comes to encouraging the parking garage industry to become more sustainable.

Also noted in the article is a $180mil plan to add 1,712 parking spaces to downtown. While I’m sure this number includes a lot of parking structure rehabilitation, and probably construction of non-parking components like the ground floor retail in this garage, $105,000 each to add parking spaces seems WAY too high a price to pay. I’d imagine that money could be much more effectively spent on Transportation Demand Management efforts to reduce parking demand, rather than on increasing parking supply.

Criticisms aside, I’m excited to see sustainable practices creeping into the parking industry, and I applaud Santa Monica for gathering the political will (and budget!) to make this important project a reality.

Cree, Inc. and the the City of Raleigh installed Optimized Digital Lighting® lowbay fixtures designed by Lighting Science inside the Raleigh Municipal Building parking deck in December 2006. Progress Energy, Raleigh’s primary electric utility provider, says the floor equipped with LED lights uses over 40 percent less energy than the lighting system it replaced. Plus, according to Progress Energy’s research, the quality of light in the garage is greatly improved.

I can’t find anything in the publicity materials discussing pricing or ROI, so I’m not sure if larger-scale replacement of existing HID or fluorescent lighting with LED lighting in parking garages would be cost effective. However, the product literature does mention an intriguing Energy Savings Sharing Program, described on another web page:

Energy Savings Sharing ProgramSM which allows your organization to experience immediate energy savings by installing Optimized Digital Lighting solutions at no cost. The program pays for itself by sharing the monthly savings between your organization and Lighting Science over the life of the contract.

I recently had some interesting conversations with parking garage owners, managers, and developers regarding garage lighting and energy efficiency. A number of them indicated their belief that LED lighting, while more efficient than any other form, is unsuitable for parking garages due to various intensity and light “spread” issues. The trial installation in Raleigh seems to strongly suggest otherwise, and that LED lighting can actually improve parking garage light quality. Can any of you readers comment on your experience with, or knowledge of, LED lighting in parking garages?

Please don’t ticket me I’m parking
Just give me a moment please
I would have gotten a permit
Except that I can’t read
Don’t try to stop me now
Cause I’ll just have a fit
I dont’ want to be late
for my class in English Lit

Excuse where I’m parking
I know it’s a loading zone
And I’m not really loaded…
I almost never drink alone
But if I park here often
Perhaps I’ll find a friend
Then we can meet here everyday
Getting loaded once again

Hey watch out there I’m parking
To bad I’ve blocked you in
You really must control yourself
Impatience is a sin–
Of course I’m in a hurry
I’ll be back late tonight
Perhaps the car behind you wil lleave
Then it will be alright
I can’t stay here to discuss it
I’ve really got to run
I certainly can’t be late for Ethics 101

Be careful here I’m parking
Half in handicap. Half on the curb
I see it as a compromise
At that I’m just superb.
I like to park in exciting ways
It adds some zest to my days
I’m hoping to form a parking maze
Ecletic parking will become a craze
This habit will take root!
Just a minute. What do you mean?
I’m wearing sandels not a boot..

by RGile

“But the idea has plenty of detractors, starting with those who say the price increases fall disproportionately on people for whom they are a hardship.

Is this stating the obvious, or am I missing something? The real question is should we be offering a subsidy to drivers, in the form of underpriced parking? Parking was never free, it was just paid for by others - now that those actually using the parking are being asked to pay its fair price (as determined by the marketplace) is this a disproportionate burden?

“Also, many market-based plans eliminate minimum parking requirements for developers, which critics say gives developers a profit boost and creates a parking crunch down the line.”

Eliminating minimum parking requirements may indeed create a parking crunch later, but I think in many cases this delay is actually a positive thing. See my previous blog post on this topic.

I think much of the debate on this topic centers, fundamentally, around a single factor - our relative willingness to tolerate time-lag, and thus “money-lag”, in addressing parking issues. Let me explain: In the traditional world of parking requirements, we try to solve problems before they occur, but we spend more than is generally required to do so. Parking requirements are “calculated” (I’m being generous with that term) to provide sufficient parking for the related building users at almost all times. This means building more parking that is typically consumed - as noted in the Seattle article, parking requirements for grocery stores were set about 50% higher than the observed usage. In this traditional parking requirements approach, there are rarely problems of insufficient parking (instead, there are more typically problems associated with too much parking) and the parking “problem” caused by the new development is solved before the development opens its doors.

In the new marked-based approach to parking, where requirements are removed and developers or business owners are allowed to decide for themselves how much parking to provide, we face a different time-lag issue. I believe that as market-based approaches proliferate, we’ll see some problems related to insufficient parking. On the Portland Transport blog a commenter notes this has already happened in their neighborhood. Those problems will, inevitably, be solved as time goes by - either parking will be provided by for-profit parking operators, drivers will shift to other modes, or the business that generated the parking demand will depart the area. All of these solutions, however, face a time-lag issue - they can only occur AFTER the parking problem has manifested itself. On the other hand, these solutions have a major “money-lag” benefit - they didn’t require spending on “predicted” solutions before the problem was apparent, and they’ll probably be more efficient uses of capital once the solutions are implemented. Why more efficient? Partially because they simply occur later (a dollar spent 3 years from now will be cheaper than a dollar spent today), and partly because the solutions will be much better matched to the problems (ie the grocery store won’t build 3 spaces when only 2 were needed, they’ll build 2, thus saving that 1 space’s cost).

So, the debate in the parking requirements vs marked-based approach should really be around what level of time-lag, between problem identification and solution implementation, are we willing to tolerate, which is another way of saying what level of wasted investment are we willing to tolerate. So, what level are you willing to tolerate?

The Parking Network details yet another online parking marketplace set to launch soon. YouCanPark.com helps connect drivers in the UK with owners of parking spaces that would like to sell them. I wish all the online parking marketplace entrepreneurs well, as a fellow parking entrepreneur, but I’m still not convinced that they’ll be able to make a living selling parking online. My main concern is that the services seem to work best for monthly, or at least regular, parking. If you need a monthly spot near your home or work, you can often walk or drive around looking for garages or lots that advertise “monthly parking available”. I’m sure there are a few areas where insufficient monthly parking is available, and those will be helped by these sites, but most areas in which parking is in short supply tend to have paid parking options that are easy to find without going online. For one-time parking (like when you are going to a meeting across town) I’m not at all sure that the parking marketplace website can improve the parking search process so much that drivers will prefer to find parking online before they leave their home or office, rather than just looking for it when they arrive at their destination like they’ve done for many decades. As noted above, I’m not yet convinced one way or the other, and if I’m missing something here, please use the comments to teach me and the other readers why online parking marketplaces are going to succeed.

Update: Whoops, I left out yet another another (yeah, I meant that) online parking marketplace I recently learned about - ParkMatch, which seems to be initially focusing on San Francisco.